Friday Fun: Canuck the Vote

From The Daily Show:


 

Video: Olbermann on the Palin Interview

Yes, Keith Olbermann is mainly a bloviating blowhard most nites who could obviously use a very long vacation away from politics considering that, any day now, his head could literally explode but he did a good job of dissecting Charlie Gibson's interviews with Palin on Friday nite:



Sarah Palin: Talking Points Machine

I've long suspected that Republicans are bots. Those interview clips confirmed those suspicions.



That was followed by more analysis by Newsweek's Richard Wolfe:


Sarah Palin is a nightmare waiting to happen.
 

Video: Chris Matthews OWNS Republican Kevin James

Does it get any more humiliating than this? I don't think so.

Watch as Republican radio host Kevin James makes a complete fool of himself:


 

Friday Fun: Chris Matthews Gropes Ellen DeGeneres

 

 

Only 332 days left of this...

Video: Awk-ward! Tx Senator Can't Name One Obama Accomplishment

A Texas-sized faux pas - state senator Kirk Watson: all hat, no cattle.
 

Video: Bush's State of the Union '08

Video: The SC Democratic Debate - Obama vs Clinton

If you missed the debate in South Carolina on Monday nite, here's a clip of one of the feisty exchanges between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It seemed like at any moment the tension would bring on, 'Jane, you ignorant slut' and 'Dan, you pompous ass'. Popcorn Moments™ abounded and a rough time was had by all.



You can read the transcript here (but watching it was much more fun.)
 

Friday Fun

Me, after a week of unpacking:

Video: Olbermann on Torture, Mukasey and Bush

From the transcript:

Water-boarding, he [Levin] said, is torture.

Legally, it is torture .

Practically, it is torture.

Ethically, it is torture .

And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd President: "The United States of America does not torture."

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.

Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal.

Does anyone have the guts to pursue it? That is the question.

You can read the ABC News article about Daniel Levin's experience here.

Update:

The Senate Judiciary Committee today narrowly voted to approve the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general despite the opposition of most of the panel's Democrats over his refusal to say whether an aggressive interrogation tactic constitutes illegal torture.

The committee's 11-8 vote sends Mukasey nomination to the full Senate, which is expected to confirm him in a floor vote to be held by next week.

link

Breaking News: Mandela Still Isn't Dead

After hearing that Bush had proclaimed Nelson Mandela as being dead:



The Nelson Mandela Foundation confirmed on Friday that he's not dead yet!

And, beyond that, Bush also committed a diplomatic faux pas:

References to his death -- Mandela is now 89 and increasingly frail -- are seen as insensitive in South Africa.

South Africa, meet Mr Insensitivity.
 

Video: Olbermann on Bush's Hypocrisy

The US senate on Thursday wasted its precious time debating and passing a resolution condemning MoveOn.org's ad about General Petraeus.

Think about that.

With all of the business the Democratically-controlled senate should be giving serious consideration to, it wasted hours discussing an issue of free speech. Over 20 Democrats rolled over and play scared patriot and went along with the Republican resolution. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) tried to offer an amendment (that was shut down) adding condemnations of the swiftboating of John Kerry and the shameful ad run against veteran Max Cleland in 2004. The important word in that previous sentence is "adding" because the wording of her amendment also included decrying MoveOn's ad.

At every turn, the Democrats have run away from criticism that they aren't "serious" about dealing with terrorism. They fall over any time sometime from the right accuses them of not supporting the troops or the US military. They continue to act out of fear and cowardice even though they have the power to set the agenda. They have been absolutely useless since they won back the house and senate. And now, here they are again, bowing to their right-wing masters who happen to be offended by a newspaper ad.

Keith Olbermann took on this issue on Thursday evening in his special comment: Olbermann to Bush: ‘Your hypocrisy is so vast’ (transcript)

Here's the video and I hope more than a few of those Democratic pushovers watched his show as well:

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

~Albert Einstein

Video: Student Tasered at John Kerry Forum

officer.com has a longer version of the video which offers more context about what happened directly before and after the tasering.

A University of Florida student was Tasered and arrested after trying to ask U.S. Senator John Kerry about the 2004 election and other subjects during a campus forum.

Videos of the incident posted on several Web sites show officers pulling Andrew Meyer, 21, away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

"He apparently asked several questions - he went on for quite awhile - then he was asked to stop," university spokesman Steve Orlando said. "He had used his allotted time. His microphone was cut off, then he became upset."

Well, university spokesman Steve Orlando, if you actually watched the second video you'll see that Meyer did not go on for "quite a while" and that he "became upset" not because his mic was cut off but because he was grabbed by a police officer just after he asked his Skull and Bones question. Nothing like obfuscating the facts to try and place blame on the victim.

And speaking of blaming the victim, who obviously didn't need to be tasered considering the mass of police officers who descended upon him, the AP has now modified its original story (which I linked to above) adding this:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) -- A university student with a history of taping his own practical jokes was Tasered by campus police and arrested after loudly and repeatedly trying to ask U.S. Senator John Kerry questions during a campus forum.

The questions he asked Kerry sure seemed dead serious to me and there's no way anyone could conclude that what happened was about trying to instigate a "practical joke".

The AP article continues:

Meyer has his own Web site and it contains several "comedy" videos that he appears in. In one, he stands in a street with a sign that says "Harry Dies" after the latest Harry Potter book was released. In another, he acts like a drunk while trying to pick up a woman in a bar.

The site also has what is called a "disorganized diatribe" attributed to Meyer that criticizes the Iraq war, the news media for not covering the conflict enough and the American public for paying too much attention to celebrity news.

To which I say, so what??.

Meyer spent the nite in jail and was released on Tuesday morning.

Meyer was arrested on charges of resisting an officer and disturbing the peace, according to Alachua County jail records, but the State Attorney's Office had yet to make the formal charging decision. Police recommended charges of resisting arrest with violence, a felony, and disturbing the peace and interfering with school administrative functions, a misdemeanor.

Related:

Andrew Meyer's site

The Miami Herald spoke to Meyers' grandmother.

John Kerry has released this statement:

In 37 years of public appearances, through wars, protests and highly emotional events, I have never had a dialogue end this way. I believe I could have handled the situation without interruption, but again I do not know what warnings or other exchanges transpired between the young man and the police prior to his barging to the front of the line and their intervention. I asked the police to allow me to answer the question and was in the process of answering him when he was taken into custody. I was not aware that a taser was used until after I left the building. I hope that neither the student nor any of the police were injured. I regret enormously that a good healthy discussion was interrupted.

I don't know how Kerry couldn't have heard the cries from Meyer to the police not to taser him. Then again, Kerry is so in love with the sound of his own voice, it's quite possible that he wasn't even paying attention.
 

Sunday Food for Thought: RFK Speaking About Violence

This clip is from the end of the 2006 movie Bobby.



You can read this speech in its entirety here.

Excerpt:

"Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we known what must be done. “When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies – to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

Video: Olbermann - Surge Protectors & The Great Conflation

All of the buzz leading up to the surge report to be given by Petraeus next week has been like watching movie trailers in which the major action shots released show, for all intents and purposes, the entire content of the movie.

There won't be any surprises.

Olbermann has a look at how "insurgent" numbers have been fixed around the surge policy and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek discusses 'The Great Conflation" ie. the continual, nauseating linking of the Iraq war with 9/11.



The situation in Iraq is such a farce that an independent report this week called for disbanding Iraq's national police force which is rife with sectarian Shiite bias. The Democrats, meanwhile, couldn't put a coherent policy plan together about how to deal with the Iraq war if their lives depended on it. Maybe that's the problem: their lives don't depend on it. They might be singing a different tune if they were all forced to live in the middle of Baghdad for a month or so. In the meantime, they just cobble together whatever they think might make their base happy while blaming those nasty Republicans for not being able to get anything done. (And those Republicans are nasty, but at least they know how to put up a real fight when they go after something they want.)

Dana Milbank, in what is perhaps a precursor to what will surely be the reactions from both parties to the WH/Petraeus report next week, shows how Democrats and Republicans are using the independent commission's report to try and sell the same old schtick about the war. No one, it seems, has any new ideas.

Madeleine Albright seems to think that if only Bush would admit his mistakes, some major corner would be turned for US allies to come in and save the day. It's long past time for that to mean anything and Bush won't do it anyway, so what's the point?

As for what Olbermann and Alter were talking about, here is the WaPo story about how the surge numbers have been manipulated.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."

"spaghetti".

There you have it.

I'm sorry, but aren't we talking about dead people here?

Related:
Most of world wants U.S. out of Iraq in a year: poll

New Twist In Saga Over ‘Petraeus Report’: There Will Be No Report
 

Rarely is the question asked...

...is our children learning? - George W Bush

So, is they? You be the judge:

Friday Fun: Nora, the piano playing cat

I'll have a cat story for you later on today. Stay tuned (pun intended).
 

Video: Olbermann on Gonzales' Credibility

Impeach the lying bastard and get it over with.
 

Video: McCain Sings "Bomb Iran"

To the tune of "Barbara Ann".



I wonder if he sang that when he went for his leisurely stroll through that Baghdad market.

Campaign spokesman Matt David said the question was asked somewhat in jest and that the Arizona senator was adding some levity to the discussion.

liberal catnip spokesherb catnip said the Arizona senator's chances of becoming the next US president just rose 1000% among those who love dubya.
 

Late Nite Video: Aguilera Sings 'It's a Man's World'

Performed at the 2007 Grammy Awards ceremony